AFL-CIO opposes guest workers

The nation’s largest labor organization today criticized plans to expand guest worker programs for immigrants seeking to come to the United States, parting company with longtime Senate Democratic allies who pushed successfully to include them in broad-based immigration legislation.

“Guest worker programs are a bad idea and harm all workers,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement released the day after the Senate Judiciary Committee cleared an immigration bill. “They cast workers into a perennial second-class status, and unfairly put their fates into their employers’ hands.”